CHAPTER XI
DELONEY AND OTHERS

Thomas ALTHOUGH two of his three works of fiction were reprinted during
Dtlonefs the nineteenth centuiy,1 the novelist Deloney was strangely over-
P~fetn looked by chroniclers of literature, and his right to a foremost place
tfjU&m *n tne history of Elizabethan fiction passed unrecognized until, in
1908, a critical edition of his whole works was published by F. O.
Mann. His name does not occur in the fullest account hitherto
written of the Elizabethan novel. Even from his contemporaries he
never had his due. That he was widely read among people of his
own rank in life there can be no question ; his stories were continu-
ally reprinted for more than a century after his death. But Greene,
Nashe, Harvey, and others of like pretensions speak of him only in
disparagement as a vulgar ballad-monger, and Strype condemns him
as a disreputable fellow who had stirred up discontent among the
lower orders by a scurrilous ballad on the scarcity of corn, and was
in hiding to escape arrest.2

His life Thomas Deloney (? 1543-1600) was not born in the uppermiddle
end woik class, nor was he educated at a university. It might well be said
that he belonged to no class at all, for as a ballad-maker voicing
popular grievances he was a nuisance to the magistrates, and was
liable, not merely to be lumped with the unfortunates and ne'er-
do-wells described by Awdeley and Harman, but to be summarily
apprehended as a vagrant, branded and put in the pillory.3 Such
were the laws brought about by stagnation of trade, unemployment,
high cost of living, and the consequent destitution and disorder.
Deloney obtained his education, and his acquirements were far from
contemptible, in the school of adversity j and, like Bunyan, Burns,

1 Thomas of Reading (W. J, Thorns's Early English Prose Romances, 1858) and
The Pleasant History of John Winchcomb, ed. J W. Halliwell (1859).

8 fForks of Deloney^ ed F. O. Mann , introduction, vin -ix.

* Chevalley, A., Thomas Deloney • le roman des matters au temps de Shakespeare
(Pans, 1926).

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